Undocumented workers, illegal immigrants and AP style

Leave it to Fox News to make an opinion I hold seem utterly distasteful to me:

Plenty of conservatives are pretty upset over a campaign by the Society of Professional Journalists to convince reporters to stop using the terms "illegal aliens" and "illegal immigrants" in favor of "undocumented immigrant." But none are as livid as perpetually outraged Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who on Wednesday afternoon asked if journalists were going to start calling rapists "non-consensual sex partners" next.

"You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes," Kelly said. "So how far could you take this?"

As it happens, I discussed this issue back in July in response to a post at the Feministing blog. What I said then bears repeating now:

I get it: There's a desire to use language to create dignity for people by separating humanity's inherent characteristics from the conditions that afflict them and the actions they take. So there's no more "disabled person." It's now "person with disabilities." The emphasis is on personhood. And that's nice. Laudable. But it does clutter the language: Two words become three. (Similarly, I know from painful experience that there's any number of neutered-but-nice terms for "homeless people.") Pile up enough similar examples, and over time, the cluttering of language tends to obscure more than it reveals. 

Which is the case with Feministing's snit: "Undocumented" reduces the issues at play to nothing more than a paperwork problem. (And it's not necessarily more accurate as shorthand; surely many if not most of these folks have, say, birth certificates or driver's licenses or whatnot in their home countries. What kind of documentation are we talking about?) "Illegal" more immediately conveys the sum and substance of the controversy -- and references to illegal immigration are almost always a reference to the controversy -- many people (and their American employers) have chosen to break the laws of this country by crossing the borders to work here. I think those laws should change; I don't think playing games with the language is the way to do it.

As I suggested, any kind of shorthand -- whether it's "undocumented immigrant" or "illegal immigrant" -- is always going to be overly reductive and, in the end, at leastsomewhat imprecise. Some shorthand phrases, though, are more imprecise and convey less information than others. And those phrases should generally be avoided.

Republicans don't really care about the deficit

Under pay-as-you-go rules adopted by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in 2007, tax cuts or increases in entitlement spending must be offset by tax increases or entitlement cuts. Entitlements include big health programs like Medicare and Medicaid, for which spending is on autopilot, as well as some other programs for veterans and low-income Americans. (Discretionary spending, which includes defense, is approved separately by Congress annually.)

The new Republican rules will gut pay-as-you-go because they require offsets only for entitlement increases, not for tax cuts. In effect, the new rules will codify the Republican fantasy that tax cuts do not deepen the deficit.

via nytimes.com

I think I'd admire the Republican rules if they required that a tax cut be accompanied by an equivalent reduction in spending. I wouldn't like it, but I'd respect it. As it stands, the rules let the GOP cut taxes to their heart's content without making sure those cuts don't deepen the deficit somehow.

We'll see how this plays out. But there's no evidence to support the idea that Republicans are fiscally responsible. At all.

The stimulus was good for Philadelphia

The federal reporting rules make an exact stimulus-created jobs figure for city residents very difficult to calculate, but a conservative estimate would be in the thousands. A recent report from the Keystone Research Center estimates that Philadelphia's unemployment rate would have shot to 20 percent without the stimulus. Instead, the rate at the end of October was 11.5 percent.

via philly.com

The money hasn't always been spent efficiently -- or, as the story notes, spent at all. But I'd take an 8.5 percent drop in unemployment any day.

Me at Metropolis: On the rootlessness of our Webified world

I'm published today at the Metropolis, pondering the ways that Internet culture can make it difficult to connect to your local community:

So when it came time to move to Philadelphia, we got rid of everything that would help us connect with the world immediately around us: the radio and the television and the newspaper subscription. Our computers would work for all those things. Right?

What I found out is this: The miracle of the Internet is that it can bring you news, music and video from anywhere on the planet. The curse of the Internet, it turns out, is that it can bring you news, music and video from anywhere on the planet. It's easy to avoid the local culture. In my eagerness to abandon the provincialism of my youth, I forgot that you can only live where you live.

This might seem a strange essay coming from me, since I've built my (ahem) career over the last decade by jumping with both feet into what is still sometimes called "New Media." That's served me well, as has my ability to connect to the broader culture in the ways I describe. I wouldn't take it back. But those benefits don't -- haven't -- come entirely without costs, even to me personally. I'm trying to figure out how to find the best balance my life -- and my parenting -- so that I can embrace the best of what Internet Culture has created without untethering myself entirely from the analog world. I don't want to become a Luddite, reading dusty texts by candlelight, but I don't want to live inside a Tron video game either. It's a daily struggle. 

But please, follow the link. Give it a thumbs-up and comment, so Tom Ferrick will be inclined to run my stuff again in the future. 

Tucker Carlson's talent: We'd rather be on Michael Vick's side

Carlson differentiated between Vick and others because Vick "killed dogs...in a heartless and cruel way." This is true. But what Carlson believed to be the proper punishment for Vick is sure to get some attention:

"I think, personally, he should have been executed for that."

via tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com

Christopher Beam is wrong to say libertarians own the heritage of the Founders

In his much-discussed and mostly pretty-good overview of libertarianism for New York Magazine, Christopher Beam makes a statement I think is just flat-out wrong:

Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them. 

Beam might be right, as far as the Revolution goes. But the people who created and advocated for the adoption of the Constitution weren't really the libertarians of their day. They were trying to consolidate power for a national government, and even gave it unlimited power of taxation! The libertarians of the day were the Antifederalists, who thought that the power of taxation and the ability to create a standing army -- powers granted the government by the new Constitution -- were a dangerous threat to their hard-won liberty. Heck, the reason I even know of the Antifederalists is due to the proddings of a libertarian friend of mine. The Constitution might've restrained the powers of government compared to, say, the British monarchy -- but it was a lot more than limited-government types of the era felt entirely comfortable with. Granting libertarians a stronger purchase on the history of the Founders is simply incorrect.

Even Stanley Kurtz doesn't buy Jonah Goldberg's defense of red-baiting Stanley Kurtz

Remember last week, when Jonah Goldberg said that Stanley Kurtz's new book calling Obama a socialist isn't the same thing as calling him a communist -- and it's those oversensitive liberals who are conflating communism and socialism? Remember that?

For example, I’ve just been dipping in and out of Stan’s book, but nowhere I’ve seen does he call Obama a Communist. I’m sure Dave understands the distinction and he might have simply found the word-play irresistible, but it’s worth noting that the Hammer and Sickle are not symbols of socialism but of Communism.

Who is seeing Hammer and Sickles everywhere now?

I responded by noting that the cover of Kurtz's book actually features Obama's face superimposed on a red star. But it turns out you don't need to read into the cover symbolism to believe that Kurtz is doing a bit of red-baiting here. Here's Kurtz himself, today: 

There’s no doubt that Radical-in-Chief’s cover art draws the reader’s eye with a spectacular symbol of classic Marxist socialism. It would have been tough to put a picture of the Midwest Academy on the book, since no-one’s ever heard of it, and since the Midwest Academy keeps its socialism secret in any case. I get at the stealthy, pragmatic, and incremental Midwest Academy-style socialism the reader will learn about inside through the book’s subtitle.

But the fact is that a lot of Radical-in-Chief is about good old fashioned Marxism. There’s the story of Reverend Wright’s adventures in Cuba, for example, which drew Obama to Wright’s church, I claim. And Obama himself was a revolutionary Marxist at Occidental College. Also, many of the Swedish-style socialist organizers who trained and sponsored Obama supported Marxist regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua. Alice Palmer, who chose Obama to be her successor in the Illinois State Senate, was a fan of the Soviet Union. Bill Ayers often wears the red star. Despite their democratic professions, many of Obama’s stealth-socialist community organizer colleagues believed that a violent socialist revolution would be necessary in the future. And some of Obama’s mentors favored Swedish social experiments that skirted the boundary between democratic socialism and outright authoritarianism. Even Obama’s most gradualist mentors saw their ideological stealth as a modern version of Communist Party strategy during the Popular Front period.

So while American socialism definitely changed during its turn to community organizing in the eighties and nineties, the hard-core Marxist past was never entirely shed. The book grapples with that complexity. The Swedish alternative is real, but the links to the bad old Marxist days remain. That’s part of what makes even reformed socialism a matter of legitimate concern to those who love liberty.

Now, maybe this isn't directly calling Obama a communist. But he's certainly making a direct case that at one point, at least, Obama was a Marxist. (Can we agree that word is a synonym for Communist, or is more parsing called for?) And he's certainly making the case that Obama is so tied to and enmeshed with Marxists that his presidency endangers our country. I'm not sure that Goldberg's effort at pedantry -- communism is different from socialism, and Democrats are getting their feelings hurt because of their own inability to make distinctions -- really stands up at all in light of Kurtz's own words.

In any case, if Obama's a socialist, he's a damned lousy one. Tax cuts for the rich? Putting GM back on the market after saving it? Passing health reform by keeping insurance entirely in the hands of private companies? No doubt Kurtz and others will view this as Alinskyite go-slow subversion of free markets, but most of the rest of us don't see a president who looks all that radical. 

I buy a lottery ticket twice a year. This week is one of those times.

The Mega Millions lottery annuity jackpot jumped to $237 million ($150.8 million cash) today after Tuesday night's drawing produced no top prize winner.

The jackpot is the biggest on offer since June in either the Mega Millions of Powerball games when one ticket had all the numbers in $261.6 million Powerball drawing.

via philly.com

I know and fully agree with all the arguments against the existence of a lottery -- it amounts to a tax on the poor, one that encourages them to spend money on hopeless dreams instead of productive purposes here and now. And I know the odds against winning the lottery: I'm almost certainly not the person who will win it if I play.

On the other hand: *Somebody's* going to win this money. $1 won't make my son go without a meal. So -- completely irrationally -- I will buy a single Mega Millions ticket this week.

About those Predator drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan

These attacks by unmanned aircraft may have succeeded in eliminating hundreds of dangerous militants, but the truth is that they also kill innocent civilians indiscriminately and in large numbers. According to the New America Foundation, one in four of those killed by drones since 2004 has been an innocent. The Brookings Institute, however, has calculated a much higher civilian-to-militant ratio of 10:1. Meanwhile, figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities suggest US strikes killed 701 people between January 2006 and April 2009, of which 14 were al-Qaida militants and 687 were civilians. That produces a hit rate of just 2% – or 50 civilians dead for every militant killed.

via guardian.co.uk

Obviously, the numbers are all over the place. But if the United States really is killing civilians in significant numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq, it could hardly do more to spread the ideologies of terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal has its death panel cake, eats it too

Here's the WSJ headline on its editorial about the revival of government-sponsored, voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions for seniors:

headline.png.png on Aviary.

Remember Sarah Palin's point? It was that the government was going to set up a bureaucracy that forced seniors to commit suicide so they wouldn't spend our precious health care resources. That was never, ever, ever true. It was either a lie or a gross misunderstanding on Palin's part, but it was never, ever true.

And the Wall Street Journal, once you get past the inflammatory headline, admits this!

Certain quarters on the political right are following the media's imagination and blasting Dr. Berwick's decision as the tangible institution of death panels. But the rule-making is not coercive and gives seniors more autonomy, not less.

In this case, fully a fifth of the U.S. population will be over age 65 inside of two decades, and whatever the other marvels of modern medicine, the mortality rate remains 100%. Advance care planning lays out the options and allows patients, in consultation with their providers and family members, to ensure that their future treatment is consistent with their wishes and moral values should they become too sick to decide for themselves.

So, wait: If end-of-life counseling sessions aren't anything like death panels, then how does can the WSJ headline say Palin "had a point"?

We wrote at the time that Sarah Palin's coinage was sensationalistic, but it was meant to illustrate a larger truth about a world of finite resources and infinite entitlement wants.

Hmm. I'm not sure that "larger truths" can be well-illustrated by fat, whopping mistruths compounded by sensationalistic headlines contradicted by the articles they lead. But maybe that's how the WSJ editorial board does business. 

Income inequality: Rein in the rich or lift up the poor?

In his post on income inequality, Mickey Kaus gets at another question that I want to get answered during my year of immersion reading: Is it better to restrain the income of the rich or to lift the incomes of the poor:

The question is then what makes Brazil Brazil. Is it wild riches at the top, or extreme poverty at the bottom? It seems pretty obvious, from what little I know of Brazil, that the problem is the bottom, not the top. We worry about Brazil because of the favelas, the huge impoverished shantytowns, and the crime coming out of them. 

I think Kaus is mostly right about this: I don't feel class-envy need to keep Bill Gates from earning another billion dollars or so. 

But...

The evidence suggests that -- recent circumstances notwithstanding -- the amount of actual wealth in America grew during the last 30 years. And that the people who were already rich did pretty much all of the accumulating of that wealth, while incomes for the rest of us stagnated during that time. But I have a hard time believing that the people in the Top 1 Percent who accumulated all that additional wealth did all the creating of all that additional wealth. I suspect that additional wealth was created, in part, on the labor and ideas and sweat of people further down the food chain who might not've shared proportionately in the rewards. (Although perhaps I'll be disabused of that notion as I keep up my reading.)

Assuming they're not simply shills for rich business interests, that should concern lovers of the free market: If hard work and productivity don't actually bring you additional income -- and that seems to be the case under the prevailing ideologies of the last 30 years -- then where's the incentive to hard work and increase productivity? 

Preserving the free market aside, though, I think this is one of my concerns about growing income inequality: It suggests that most of us aren't being rewarded for our part in creating wealth for others. So I'm concerned about the runaway wealth accumulation of the Top 1 Percent because it suggests that the system is badly broken in its distribution of the wealth it creates, not because I don't want people to make more money.

Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily founder, RIP

Denis Dutton in 1998 created the well-read Arts & Letters Daily, which the New Yorker's Blake Eskin today calls "the first and foremost aggregator of well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas. Denis was the intellectual’s Matt Drudge." Dutton, a philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, has died after having cancer. He was the brother of the former Los Angeles booksellers Doug and Davis Dutton. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which bought Arts & Letters Daily in 2002, announced that the site will attempt to continue.

via laobserved.com

I've not much to add, except that Dutton's website was one of those places that made a guy from Kansas feel liberated by the Internet -- regular exposure to the world of ideas made my world bigger. I'm grateful to Dutton for his work. Rest in peace.

Kaus, Obama, income inequality and immigration

I think I've mentioned before that 2011 will be my year of reading about income inequality and the welfare state. I've already got a running head start with the Christmastime purchase of Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal." My plan is to read a serious of books along the political spectrum -- William Voegeli's "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State" is next on the list.

But the national discussion is currently outracing my attempts to build a foundation for my own contributions to the debate. Today, Mickey Kaus weighs in with his own suggestion about what President Obama can really do if he wants to address income inequality: Put a clamp on illegal immigration:

 A major enemy of tight labor markets at the bottom is also fairly clear: unchecked immigration by undocumented low-skilled workers. It's hard for a day laborer to command $18 an hour in the market if there are illegals hanging out on the corner willing to work for $7. Even experts who claim illlegal immigration is good for Americans overall admit that it's not good for Americans at the bottom. In other words, it's not good for income equality.

I suspect that there's something to this, but not in the way that Kaus thinks. Part of the reason that illegal immigrant labor is so cheap -- and thus contributes so mightily to income inequality -- is that employers hold pretty much all the power in the employer-employee relationship. They're generally content to overlook a worker's immigrant status as long as they provide cheap labor. But if those workers started agitating for higher pay or tried to unionize (options available to their naturalized colleagues), well, it's not too difficult to imagine a manager making a call to the authorities to get rid of the rabble-rouser, is it? So illegal workers keep their heads low and their hands busy, because the pay is still far better than what they'd make back at home. Otherwise, why would they be here?

Cracking down on illegal immigration might solve the supply-demand problem that affects income inequality, I suppose, but it seems to me also possible that a smart, always-talked-about-but-never-implemented guest worker program might do quite a bit to affect the dynamic as well. If illegal workers knew that they could fairly bargain their labor for pay without worrying about deportation or prison, the result might be higher pay. That would bring up the incomes of the lowest-earning workers, yes, but it might also give illegal workers less of a workplace advantage over similarly skilled American citizens who might require a bit more money to do the work. You don't have to build a high fence to address income inequality, in other words: Just make the immigration system make more sense.

Shmoogy Noir

Taken at Almaz Cafe

About Vick, Obama and prisoner rehabilitation

Dave Weigel onPresident Obama's praise of Michael Vick

The Vick/Obama is only interesting at the level Obama meant it to be interesting -- as the start of a discussion on prisoner rehabilitation. Vick will be fine, because he has several years left to play football better than almost anybody in the country. He gets a comeback, on national television, with an array of writers eager to chronicle it. How useful is the Vick situation for starting a discussion about prison reform, or the rights of felons? Does it make a discussion of felon re-enfranchisement any less toxic? It can, and it's really the only way that Democrats -- especially Barack Obama -- can start a discussion on this without coming out of the gate as soft-on-crime wimps.

I suspect that this discussion won't get too far with Vick as its leading example. "Rehaibilitation" is relatively easy to come by when A) you're likely to secure a multi-million dollar contract upon your release from prison and B) employers are motivated to give you that contract because of the possibility you'll help them generate millions of dollars more in ticket sales, team paraphernalia (if, as is happening with Vick right now, you take a team to the playoffs) and other opportunities. But Michael Vick is the only recent felon to whom those conditions apply. There are incentives out there for employers who hire recently released convicts, but lots of companies remain skittish about those prospects. I'm not sure how Michael Vick's example serves as a good starting point to fixing those problems.

Dennis Prager answers the question: What do women want?

I'm on record as having a fair amount of contempt for the relationship writings of conservative radio host Dennis Prager, so I braced myself when he started writing a series of columns -- posted at National Review -- about what men and women most want in the world. His column today on the second part of that question (what women want) turned out to be not as awful as I feared, but still off-target. 

What a woman most wants is to be loved by a man she admires.

The notion that a woman most wants a man, admirable or not, has been scoffed at. This was encapsulated by the famous feminist slogan, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Even feminism that did not agree with the fish-bicycle metaphor communicated to young women that an “authentic” woman would not have as her greatest desire to bond with a man.

It is problematic enough to say that a woman most wants a man. But that pales compared to the claim that she most wants man whom she admires. That seems to affirm gender inequality. The image it conjures up is of a woman looking up to her man as if he were some sort of lord and she his serf.

Yet any woman who believes that she is married to an admirable man would laugh at such a dismissal. Admiring one’s husband doesn’t render a woman a serf. It renders her fortunate.

I have no doubt that some women, many women, want most to be loved by a man they admire. Furthermore, I have little doubt that in the conservative circles Prager runs in, there are many, many women who profess as much. (I went to an evangelical Mennonite college in the Midwest where women regularly said they were seeking a husband who could provide "Christian leadership." I know that lots of folks like this exist.) Where Prager goes wrong, I think, is in his apparent implication that he could pluck any woman out of a crowd and know that's what she wants most -- or if she doesn't, she's clearly been brainwashed by feminism.

First of all: Not every women wants to be loved by a man. 

Second: Love isn't necessarily the highest goal of every remaining straight woman. Different people prioritize things differently.

Third: Prager is right that the word "admires" does conjure some of the cognitive trouble he expected. If he'd used the word "respects" -- and I think it would've covered many the aspects he intends by the word -- I might not quibble. Much. 

But all of this, as I said, is incidental to Prager's foundational problem: His belief that he knows what women want. Modern conservatism, as a political tradition, tends to very strongly emphasize individual rights and responsibilities -- rhetorically, at least, it recognizes that different people want different things, and wants them to be free to pursue those different things in their own way. Prager doesn't seem to really belong to this tradition, though. Instead -- whether he realizes it or not -- he's the reason that feminism came into being in the first place: Because some women wanted the freedom to make and pursue different choices than the ones expected of them in a male-dominated society.

It may be that many women want what Prager believes they want; but his framing doesn't allow for the possibility that healthy women may make other choices, may want other things. Indeed, he pretty clearly holds such differing ideas in contempt. So while some of his advice might seem sound -- dudes, work hard to improve your lot in life! -- it's founded in a worldview that seems to deny women their individuality. Because of that, I'm not really interested in taking his relationship advice.

Netflix Queue: 'Restrepo'

Three thoughts about 'Restrepo,' coming up after the trailer:

• This movie is a documentary about the life of an American Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley in 2007. Americans weren't paying as much attention to Afghanistan at that point: Iraq was consuming most of our attention. But the war there was every bit as real and intense for these soldiers; the combat footage is some of the most harrowing I've ever seen -- not unflinching, exactly, because we're not shown much of actual death or wounds, but it does walk right up to the line of what American viewers will find acceptable in depicting combat deaths. It is devastating.

• Watching 'Restrepo,' though, I realized how much of my understanding of war is generally shaped by war movies, and because of that by the language of Hollywood generally. There were several moments throughout the documentary that I thought were foreshadowing an imminent violent death -- because that's how those moments would've been used in a Hollywood production. 'Restrepo' eschewed such tricks, for the most part: If violent death was coming, it used its narrators -- soldiers from the unit, reflecting on their experiences months later in studio interviews, from the relative safety of an Army base in Italy -- to tell us precisely what was coming. Only then were we shown. 

• The movie's most emblematic character is Capt. Dan Kearney, leader of the squad that we follow. He arrives in Afghanistan looking a bit dim but well-intentioned -- he tells viewers he read nothing about the Korengal Valley before deploying there, because he wanted to approach the problems there "with an open mind" -- intending to do the "nice guy" work of counterinsurgency: meeting weekly with local elders, promising jobs and building projects in exchange for their help. By the end, though, the intentions have gone awry: He tells the gathering of elders he doesn't give a fuck about their protests of the arrest of a local man they say is innocent of anti-American activity. He can't claim any real victories during his time in Afghanistan, so he talks about "changing the dynamics" of what is clearly still a deadly place for American troops.

And one can't help feel, as Kearney makes regular promises of future "progress" to Afghan elders, that the elders aren't all that interested in the kind of progress he clearly intends to be an enticement to their cooperation. There's a memorable line in "Full Metal Jacket" -- there's Hollywood war again -- that inside every enemy fighter is an American trying to scratch its way out. Forty years have passed since the war depicted in that movie, but there are moments in 'Restrepo' that suggest American hubris hasn't been tempered too much in the decades since. That's not what 'Restrepo' is about, though: It's about the daily horror experienced by the men who serve that hubris. Perhaps fittingly, the movie's happy ending is when our soldiers finally get to leave Afghanistan.

A note about Mitch McConnell's last-ditch effort to block the DADT repeal

A last-ditch effort by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to complicate the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was blocked Tuesday night after Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) objected, Senate aides said.

McConnell attempted to add an amendment to the so-called stripped-down defense authorization bill that would have required the consent of the military service chiefs to proceed with "don't ask" repeal. Under legislation passed by the Senate last week, certifications are required from the president, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. All the incumbents in those positions support repeal.

"It was a McConnell proposal," a GOP aide confirmed. "There was an attempted to get unanimous consent for it to be included in the defense bill and someone objected."

via politico.com

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it appears Sen. McConnell tried to amend the law to give the military service chiefs veto power over the decisions of their civilian superiors. He lost this round, but isn't the effort itself Constitutionally suspect?

America is a little more American today

President Obama signed the landmark repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy Wednesday morning, handing a major victory to advocates of gay rights and fulfilling a campaign promise to do away with a practice that he has called discriminatory.

Casting the repeal in terms of past civil rights struggles, Obama said he was proud to sign a law that "will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend."

He added: "No longer will our country be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans who are forced to leave the military - regardless of their skills, no matter their bravery or their zeal, no matter their years of exemplary performance - because they happen to be gay. No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder in order to serve the country that they love."

via washingtonpost.com

Howard Kurtz is really wrong about Haley Barbour

At the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz seems to think that the blowup about Haley Barbour's comments about the Concerned Citizens Councils represents unwarranted digging into Barbour's attitudes from 1962, saying the brouhaha is the press getting "worked into a lather over what Barbour did and thought when he was a teenager."

When you contemplate running for president, your life becomes an open book. Barbour should certainly be held accountable for the insensitive way he talked about the bad old days of officially sanctioned racial prejudice. His statement today is an acknowledgement of how badly he bobbled the question. But at some point you have to ask: Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on this stuff?

But nobody's getting mad at Barbour for being a Mississippian in 1962. They're getting mad at his contemporary adult understanding and presentation of what that era was like. He suggested in December 2010 -- despite decades of historical research based on accounts of the time -- that the CCCs were benign community groups when, in reallity, they were working in the service of white supremacy. I don't blame Barbour for his youth. I do blame him for whitewashing racism as an adult. The statute of limitations has barely even started on that stuff.